Before we tried anything as long as a kasen, we wanted to see whether the six of us could work together at all. So in March we started this one, a short renku of twelve verses, at a verse or two a week. It goes around the year once, from spring back to spring, with one moon and one blossom. We finished it the last week of April.

It is not perfect. The link between the third and fourth verses is thin, and Robert still wants his salt back. But it was our first, and when the last verse came in I printed it out and read it aloud on the back porch to nobody but the mynah birds, and I knew we would do a longer one.

A few notes. The acequia in Sandra's blossom verse is an irrigation ditch, the old kind that the farmers in her valley still dig out together every spring. The tobacco barn is Jay's grandfather's, still standing, though nobody has cured tobacco in it since 1971. And Robert's fourth verse first said "over the price of salt," meaning road salt, until Mary pointed out that the same words were already the title of a well-known novel. We didn't want anyone thinking we'd borrowed it. Robert has not forgiven her.